Alejandro Diaz, Happiness is Expensive, 2008, Neon, Photo by Sarah Douglas, Happy Lion, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Happiness is sold out
According to Artinfo, Los Angeles-based gallery The Happy Lion sold all three of Alejandro Diaz's Happiness is Expensive (2008) neon sculptures for a relatively modest range of $4,000 to $6000 each at London's Frieze Fair. Signs of realism?
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James Hayward, Abstract #70 (Cobalt Violet), 2004, oil on canvas on wood panel, 20 1/2 x 16 1/4", Modernism, San Francisco
Sink Your Teeth
Hit the pause button. Our troubles aren't going anywhere. Fuck it. Let's dance.
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Eleanor Antin, 100 BOOTS MOVE ON, Sorrento Valley, Calif., June 24, 1972 8:50 A.M. (Photo: Philip Steinmetz) From original postcard mailed circa 1972, 100 Boots, 1971-73, private collection
Time Again to Move On
Over 35 years ago Eleanor Antin took her empty boots on the road. Today, the missing number exponentially.
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(Antin: Historical Takes currently on view at San Diego Art Museum)
Julius Shulman, March 2007
Photograph from Julius Shulman Does His Own House, Nazraeli Press, 2008
Happy 98th, Julius!
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Maurice (Tom) Keegan, Android Family Hallucinating Disneyland, 1977, Drypoint on paper, ed. of 6, Private Collection
Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah!
- Bowie
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Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade II, 1999, C-Print, Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
Fall is in the air. Brace yourselves for the long, cold winter in the art market. It's going to be a chilly December in Miami Beach. This morning, Reuters reported the sobering results from Sotheby's important auction of Chinese contemporary art in Hong Kong. The dispatch noted "19 of 47 prominent works went unsold and others barely hit low estimates." With the financial indeces circling the drain, no market will be immune from the looming freeze. Such is the global contagion. Drink up. It's last call.
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Untitled, 2003, Styrofoam Cups Hot Glue, Tara Donovan, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles
Readymade revival, so happy together
When Marcel Duchamp moved to the U.S. in 1915, he allegedly encountered the snow shovel for the first time. It was an epiphany for him. Art need not be painted. He could go to Woolworth's and acquire his art ready-made. Half a century later Robert Smithson likened Duchamp's rejection of "retinal art" to a spiritual awakening for ordinary objects. The snow shovel like his inverted bicycle wheel were preludes. Before World War I ended, Duchamp would marry the low-brow to high art when he famously united the urinal with the art world. Back then, however, he was the high priest of a small movement. Andy Warhol would take it retail when he compared the Macy's department store to museums. The crowds grew larger.
Today the stakes have grown higher and the zealotry of contemporary art has escalated to an evangelical fervor. The denizens descend in droves to the art fairs from Basel to Miami Beach, and the rest of us shop at Costco and Wal-Mart. Now a new Rick Warren of the readymade alter has arisen Phoenix-like from the aisles of the warehouse store. Tara Donovan has come to the rescue, freeing the ordinary en masse from their common fate to tele-evangelical heights never seen before in Duchamp's day nor in retail design. That's because she has to buy out entire stocks to shape her installations in the cavernous exhibition spaces of the likes of Ace Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, and the numerous kunsthalles to follow. In her hands, the Styrofoam cup has regained its ubiquity after being shunned by Starbuck's, no longer the bane of landfill. Instead, thousands of Styrofoam cups combine to form clouds the size of a house. Or she stacks thousands upon thousands of drinking straws to create a ghost-like alter evoking a haze to the eye and mind. She even defies gravity, coaxing tens of thousands of toothpicks to stick together forming a four-foot cube and paean to post-minimalism. Donovan's art and genius will come together in October in Boston and beyond.
She can borrow our club card anytime.
Toothpicks, 2001, Toothpicks held together by Friction and Gravity only, Tara Donovan, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles
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Photo by Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center, Sept. 10, 2008
The Rainbow Quarry's 150-foot granite walls, below sea-level, set the cliff-hanging stage for "Ocean," a reinactment in the round originally created by the avant-duo of Merce Cunnignham and John Cage. Danced under a night sky 70 miles from the Twin Cities, this was camper deluxe for the cognoscenti and the curious. The Walker Art Center went out on a rock-hard limb to mount this spectacle with a 150-piece orchestra performing in the middle of Minnesota for a sold-out, three-night run in an area where the population was barely larger than the audience. Bravo, Merce.
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RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California 1955, Julius Shulman, J. Paul Getty Trust. Julius Shulman Photography Archive Research Library at the Getty Research Institute
On Monday, September 8, 2008, the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica, CA & Washington, DC-based resource on vital public policy issues, released a study which says younger arts audiences, 30 and under, in America have declined. To reverse the slide, the report urges increased and consistent sequential arts education in K-12 schools.
While you should voice your concerns to your kids' teachers and school administrators, the study implies the benefits of taking your children to museums and concerts early and often, now. They may kick and scream, but they might discover passions and pursuits which will enrich their adult years and those of others. What's the downside?
To read the full press release and links to the RAND report, summary and full text, click here -- www.rand.org/news/press/2008/09/08/arts_education.html
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Master and Servant
Jasper Johns once lamented that artists are the elite of the servant class. No truer words sustain today's art economy. September 15-16 in London, the auction house Sotheby's is staging a sale devoted solely to the new works of Damien Hirst, revered and reviled for his pickled sharks. According to press reports this blow-out of more than 200 derivatives of Hirst's earlier pieces was conceived by his longtime business manager Frank Dunphy. Sounds like Hirst is the highly paid assistant in this show.
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